I think OOo sucks but I think M$ Office sucks more. I'd love to see an Office Suite that actually tried to improve the situation. I'll be excited to see if KOffice does anything innovative after their little contest mentioned here yesterday. AbiWord is still my wordprocessor of choice but more often I use XML, HTML, or plain-text because they do what I need.
I like to find an open AP when I need it so likewise I leave my AP's open. If I want something from others then I need to contribute by giving the same thing back when possible. If anything I think secure AP's should have to be on bandwidth licensed from the government for the purpose. Otherwise it's public bandwidth they're using for a private service. May as well build a house in a state park. To me closed AP's are stealing from the public. Of course there is no reason an open AP needs to allow Internet access - that's a different issue.
I'd say that within 10 years most movies will have a sub million dollar budget and will be made by the fans rather than the studios. Someone will find a way to make movie production into a collaborative game that takes place online and then people will make movies for fun rather than profit and participating in the creation will be as important, or more important, as a passtime than actually watching the movies. In part this may come from the online gaming world but I think it'll also draw from the wiki world and the opensource world and of course the current group of people that make video and sound production tools.
The problem is that these games were never fun to play. I've tried a couple and quit all of them because they just weren't any fun. At best the game sucks but the socialization with other people is fun. Buying gold is a symptom more than the problem. Game makers need to go back to their roots and make these games playable.
I typically make an effort to make apps work in pure HTML first. I then tie in Javascript, CSS, etc as possible to enhance that experience. There is no reason an app shouldn't be usable in a text browser and still offer full AJAX style interfaces when possible.
If you run vanilla Windows on any computer with access to data that needs to be secure your just sniffing glue. There is no real way to bar users from downloading, installing and running software, on purpose or not, in Windows without some major reconfiguration and third-party upgrades. Run an OS and specialized computer that can be more firmly locked down if you want security. User's shouldn't be able to save any data on their local systems and nothing off the fileserver should be allowed to execute.
User's are always your weakest link and Windows and the normal PC is just not designed to mistrust the user.
It's hardly Google's fault if companies use lame platforms and have stupid users. I seriously doubt that I'd have this kind of problem on my custom Linux clients running from read-only drives (drives that physically disable writes with the OS configured to disable writes for good measure).
In general purpose computing how often do I use 64bit floating point math? I've been programming for 15 years and I can probably count that need on one hand with room to spare. I can see how with certain applications it could speed things up quite a bit but I don't see those things as being very general computing tasks.
The Cell is a new CPU and needs time to evolve a little. If you try to hit every possible goal for the first generation then the stupid thing will never launch or will cost so much it'll never be used. I think they made a good decision to create this kind of CPU but it won't start getting really impressive until, or unless, there is a second generation. Of course I've noticed in most tech things third time really is the charm so it could be the same with the Cell too. Two sets of revisions and upgrades usually hits a technological sweet spot.
All it really exists for is to allow current crops of code and programmers to more easily move to the new system. It doesn't mean it's THAT hard to program the cell now. Writing a compiler that correctly optimizes code is much trickier than writing code and likewise a compiler that correctly reinvents code to be more parallel I don't doubt.
Where this will really pay off is up the food chain as it'll allow a lot of programmers to worry less about how things get done. It's like the difference between hard coding for a GPU or using OpenGL. You can write for the GPU but it's a lot more low level and there is more rope to hang yourself with.
I don't think there is much in the way of gay persecution in most areas of the US anymore. With the exception of midwest and southern rural areas which are highly conservative Christian rednecks.
When I turn on tv I see gay people or at least people who are close enough to the gay cliche that they might or might not be gay. There is no need to 'be gay' if you're gay or to play it straight.
Nobody I know, where everyone is mostly straight, has anything against gay people and many of us spend time in gay bars and things like that. Probably the worst thing we do is make little jokes by pretending to be gay ourselves (telling the other guys they look cute today etc) but it's never done in a mean way. Gay people are a large part of our customer base and we recognize that they are largely smart and well off.
Cool, I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon and this goes right along with that. I like how Neal Stephenson's books merge so well into real science and history. The only trick is in remembering which is true and which is fiction.:)
As somebody on both sides of the equation I think it's a revolving problem. Employers are cheap, which makes consumers cheap, which makes employees cheap, which makes consumers cheap, and so on. Allowing things like outsourcing to foreign countries is draining our economy out from the bottom while the rich make ever more effort to hold on to their own money which is just pushing from the top.
I think tech is just a scrap goat. Work is harder now because employers expect us to be working faster because they are cheap bastards as are consumers.
Lets worry about something that very well might be harmless because student mortality is otherwise so low that wifi is the biggest potential cause of death. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco products, unprotected sex, automobile accidents, and plain old stress related suicide and illness don't rate anywhere on the list of things to worry about after all. I'd have to guess that more people have died from injuries caused by freak accidents with soda machines than from wifi so should we see if soda machines have been banned too?
Moral of the story - technology and modern life are going to kill us all anyway so while you're at college make sure you spend your time having sex and partying. You're going to get a brain tumor anyway so might as well go out partying. (Anyone else hearing Arnold saying "It's not a tumor."?)
Or go a little south to Tijuana and get full service for under $20 for a plain jane or for about $75 from a totally smokin hottie. Or watch and get full contact teasing with hands on for free. Myself, I find the hottie sitting on my lap and touching and being touched plenty. Worth buying a couple beers and staying a while.;)
How would that be Google's fault? It's not to hard to create an image fingerprint either and those are harder to fool by making minor changes or resizing. I've used them in my own image search engines. For the most part it consists of using a little math to abstract a color pattern and a shading pattern from an image and then making hashes of those. You'd have to make major image changes to fool that kind of system and in that case you could argue that the reuse of the image falls under fair use.
Although for that matter I know for a fact that a few years ago a major court case ruled that thumbnailing was fair use. Thus the explosion of thumbnail gallery sites all of a sudden. I'm no legal guru but I thought that a ruling such as that should apply to future cases such as Google's. I'm pretty sure the case I'm thinking of was dicussed on Slashdot a few years back.
I'd love for a lot of electronics to learn to be dark. What is the freaking obsession with covering them with bright lights. These things sit in my bedroom and make the room a technocolor light show when I'm trying to sleep. Many of them turn more lights on when you turn them off! Brilliant design decision there and if you turn them off by cutting the power to them they lose your settings.
C'mon you crappy consumer hardware designers. If you must make your gizmos glow like a radioactive wasteland then make the lights go off when the power is off and make the lights dim when not being interacted with. And make the g'dam settings persistant even if the power to the device is shut off. How much memory can these settings possibly take? I can buy 32MB of flash memory for under $10 retail. Certainly a big electronics company could afford to put the memory and small amount of control logic in their device for a couple dollars. Frickin morons will waste a lot of money implementing DRM that customers don't want but not a couple bucks to make smart lights that dim as needed and settings that don't get lost all the damn time.
Exactly why they are pushing end to end DRM into everything from HD-DVD players to TVs and speakers to your home computer. They're pissed that we can still get any use out of the rather expensive products we buy from them. They'd much rather we buy an empty box and stare at the pictures on the cover and then tomorrow buy a new empty box and so on.. c'mon $20 is a fair price for an empty box with a pretty label isn't it? Afterall if you complain then you are just a pirate and obviously are trying to kill the entertainment industry by not giving your every bleeding cent to some filthy rich actor, musician, or executive.
Damn you if you just want to be able to buy their products and actually use them as you see fit. You may as well be going to their homes and raping their poor little poodles. People that don't like DRM are terrorists and child pornographers and they all worship Satan and are Muslim too.
You all go to Hell. You go to Hell and you die. Stupid homosexual movie pirates. I bet you were putting your penis in that hole in the middle of your DVD. You're all just evil.
It'd be easy enough to make images searchable by an md5 hash of the file. Then companies could police pirates using the search engine themselves. If they fail to do so then it'd be evidence that they don't mind the content being pirated.
As someone that has subscribed off and on to Perfect 10 though they're not doing much to win my affection. I usually subscribe to them for a while when a pirated pic renews my interest in their content and then unsubscribe again when I get bored of them. Most 'adult' content is that way for me. Pirated or free images serve as advertising so long as they are smart enough to get their URL into the images. I don't like print porn because it's bulky and not user friendly (one handed use is difficult) and I don't like most porn sites because they make it difficult to browse, search, download, and view their content. Simply put, it's not a matter of paying for the content so much as getting a better user experience from pirates. I don't want to one at a time it through some crappy spammy bulky website. I'd rather download all the content to my PC and then view it in my choice of programs. If the website keeps generating new content or offers bonuses such as member sharing forums (discussion and posting of their own pics/vids) they'll keep my business and they don't need to resort to making it hard to download their content.
Just another example of a company using IP laws to make up for their own lack of a modern business model. Adapt or die.
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I've been doing this with a web-based system. Not as direct but works automatically when you connect to the site. Platform independant that way.
I think OOo sucks but I think M$ Office sucks more. I'd love to see an Office Suite that actually tried to improve the situation. I'll be excited to see if KOffice does anything innovative after their little contest mentioned here yesterday. AbiWord is still my wordprocessor of choice but more often I use XML, HTML, or plain-text because they do what I need.
I like to find an open AP when I need it so likewise I leave my AP's open. If I want something from others then I need to contribute by giving the same thing back when possible. If anything I think secure AP's should have to be on bandwidth licensed from the government for the purpose. Otherwise it's public bandwidth they're using for a private service. May as well build a house in a state park. To me closed AP's are stealing from the public. Of course there is no reason an open AP needs to allow Internet access - that's a different issue.
I'd say that within 10 years most movies will have a sub million dollar budget and will be made by the fans rather than the studios. Someone will find a way to make movie production into a collaborative game that takes place online and then people will make movies for fun rather than profit and participating in the creation will be as important, or more important, as a passtime than actually watching the movies. In part this may come from the online gaming world but I think it'll also draw from the wiki world and the opensource world and of course the current group of people that make video and sound production tools.
The problem is that these games were never fun to play. I've tried a couple and quit all of them because they just weren't any fun. At best the game sucks but the socialization with other people is fun. Buying gold is a symptom more than the problem. Game makers need to go back to their roots and make these games playable.
Does HTML count as a format considering nobody checks for compliance when creating these documents? It's a really crappy format in the least.
osCommerce is just horribly coded and documented is the problem although I agree PHP isn't the best language for complex programs either.
I typically make an effort to make apps work in pure HTML first. I then tie in Javascript, CSS, etc as possible to enhance that experience. There is no reason an app shouldn't be usable in a text browser and still offer full AJAX style interfaces when possible.
If you run vanilla Windows on any computer with access to data that needs to be secure your just sniffing glue. There is no real way to bar users from downloading, installing and running software, on purpose or not, in Windows without some major reconfiguration and third-party upgrades. Run an OS and specialized computer that can be more firmly locked down if you want security. User's shouldn't be able to save any data on their local systems and nothing off the fileserver should be allowed to execute.
User's are always your weakest link and Windows and the normal PC is just not designed to mistrust the user.
It's hardly Google's fault if companies use lame platforms and have stupid users. I seriously doubt that I'd have this kind of problem on my custom Linux clients running from read-only drives (drives that physically disable writes with the OS configured to disable writes for good measure).
In general purpose computing how often do I use 64bit floating point math? I've been programming for 15 years and I can probably count that need on one hand with room to spare. I can see how with certain applications it could speed things up quite a bit but I don't see those things as being very general computing tasks.
The Cell is a new CPU and needs time to evolve a little. If you try to hit every possible goal for the first generation then the stupid thing will never launch or will cost so much it'll never be used. I think they made a good decision to create this kind of CPU but it won't start getting really impressive until, or unless, there is a second generation. Of course I've noticed in most tech things third time really is the charm so it could be the same with the Cell too. Two sets of revisions and upgrades usually hits a technological sweet spot.
All it really exists for is to allow current crops of code and programmers to more easily move to the new system. It doesn't mean it's THAT hard to program the cell now. Writing a compiler that correctly optimizes code is much trickier than writing code and likewise a compiler that correctly reinvents code to be more parallel I don't doubt.
Where this will really pay off is up the food chain as it'll allow a lot of programmers to worry less about how things get done. It's like the difference between hard coding for a GPU or using OpenGL. You can write for the GPU but it's a lot more low level and there is more rope to hang yourself with.
I don't think there is much in the way of gay persecution in most areas of the US anymore. With the exception of midwest and southern rural areas which are highly conservative Christian rednecks.
When I turn on tv I see gay people or at least people who are close enough to the gay cliche that they might or might not be gay. There is no need to 'be gay' if you're gay or to play it straight.
Nobody I know, where everyone is mostly straight, has anything against gay people and many of us spend time in gay bars and things like that. Probably the worst thing we do is make little jokes by pretending to be gay ourselves (telling the other guys they look cute today etc) but it's never done in a mean way. Gay people are a large part of our customer base and we recognize that they are largely smart and well off.
Cool, I'm re-reading Cryptonomicon and this goes right along with that. I like how Neal Stephenson's books merge so well into real science and history. The only trick is in remembering which is true and which is fiction. :)
As somebody on both sides of the equation I think it's a revolving problem. Employers are cheap, which makes consumers cheap, which makes employees cheap, which makes consumers cheap, and so on. Allowing things like outsourcing to foreign countries is draining our economy out from the bottom while the rich make ever more effort to hold on to their own money which is just pushing from the top.
I agree but I'm glad to see the ad companies making some effort to adapt rather than just blindly kill off new technology.
It's not that those are bad ideas. Just not multi-million dollar ideas.
I think tech is just a scrap goat. Work is harder now because employers expect us to be working faster because they are cheap bastards as are consumers.
Lets worry about something that very well might be harmless because student mortality is otherwise so low that wifi is the biggest potential cause of death. Drugs, alcohol, tobacco products, unprotected sex, automobile accidents, and plain old stress related suicide and illness don't rate anywhere on the list of things to worry about after all. I'd have to guess that more people have died from injuries caused by freak accidents with soda machines than from wifi so should we see if soda machines have been banned too?
Moral of the story - technology and modern life are going to kill us all anyway so while you're at college make sure you spend your time having sex and partying. You're going to get a brain tumor anyway so might as well go out partying. (Anyone else hearing Arnold saying "It's not a tumor."?)
Or go a little south to Tijuana and get full service for under $20 for a plain jane or for about $75 from a totally smokin hottie. Or watch and get full contact teasing with hands on for free. Myself, I find the hottie sitting on my lap and touching and being touched plenty. Worth buying a couple beers and staying a while. ;)
Most Unix servers have been replaced by free Linux servers. It's not that Unix has disappeared - it's just been reborn and set free.
Only wanks use Windows servers anyway. You can get a lot more bang for your buck with a Linux server.
How would that be Google's fault? It's not to hard to create an image fingerprint either and those are harder to fool by making minor changes or resizing. I've used them in my own image search engines. For the most part it consists of using a little math to abstract a color pattern and a shading pattern from an image and then making hashes of those. You'd have to make major image changes to fool that kind of system and in that case you could argue that the reuse of the image falls under fair use.
Although for that matter I know for a fact that a few years ago a major court case ruled that thumbnailing was fair use. Thus the explosion of thumbnail gallery sites all of a sudden. I'm no legal guru but I thought that a ruling such as that should apply to future cases such as Google's. I'm pretty sure the case I'm thinking of was dicussed on Slashdot a few years back.
I'd love for a lot of electronics to learn to be dark. What is the freaking obsession with covering them with bright lights. These things sit in my bedroom and make the room a technocolor light show when I'm trying to sleep. Many of them turn more lights on when you turn them off! Brilliant design decision there and if you turn them off by cutting the power to them they lose your settings.
C'mon you crappy consumer hardware designers. If you must make your gizmos glow like a radioactive wasteland then make the lights go off when the power is off and make the lights dim when not being interacted with. And make the g'dam settings persistant even if the power to the device is shut off. How much memory can these settings possibly take? I can buy 32MB of flash memory for under $10 retail. Certainly a big electronics company could afford to put the memory and small amount of control logic in their device for a couple dollars. Frickin morons will waste a lot of money implementing DRM that customers don't want but not a couple bucks to make smart lights that dim as needed and settings that don't get lost all the damn time.
Exactly why they are pushing end to end DRM into everything from HD-DVD players to TVs and speakers to your home computer. They're pissed that we can still get any use out of the rather expensive products we buy from them. They'd much rather we buy an empty box and stare at the pictures on the cover and then tomorrow buy a new empty box and so on.. c'mon $20 is a fair price for an empty box with a pretty label isn't it? Afterall if you complain then you are just a pirate and obviously are trying to kill the entertainment industry by not giving your every bleeding cent to some filthy rich actor, musician, or executive.
Damn you if you just want to be able to buy their products and actually use them as you see fit. You may as well be going to their homes and raping their poor little poodles. People that don't like DRM are terrorists and child pornographers and they all worship Satan and are Muslim too.
You all go to Hell. You go to Hell and you die. Stupid homosexual movie pirates. I bet you were putting your penis in that hole in the middle of your DVD. You're all just evil.
It'd be easy enough to make images searchable by an md5 hash of the file. Then companies could police pirates using the search engine themselves. If they fail to do so then it'd be evidence that they don't mind the content being pirated.
As someone that has subscribed off and on to Perfect 10 though they're not doing much to win my affection. I usually subscribe to them for a while when a pirated pic renews my interest in their content and then unsubscribe again when I get bored of them. Most 'adult' content is that way for me. Pirated or free images serve as advertising so long as they are smart enough to get their URL into the images. I don't like print porn because it's bulky and not user friendly (one handed use is difficult) and I don't like most porn sites because they make it difficult to browse, search, download, and view their content. Simply put, it's not a matter of paying for the content so much as getting a better user experience from pirates. I don't want to one at a time it through some crappy spammy bulky website. I'd rather download all the content to my PC and then view it in my choice of programs. If the website keeps generating new content or offers bonuses such as member sharing forums (discussion and posting of their own pics/vids) they'll keep my business and they don't need to resort to making it hard to download their content.
Just another example of a company using IP laws to make up for their own lack of a modern business model. Adapt or die.